Democrats are Hiding the Rise in Violent Crime with Tricky Statistics; Kamala Harris Is Trying to Run From Her Prosecutorial Record
Democrats are hiding the rise in violent crime with tricky statistics:
“Make no mistake, violent crime was up under Donald Trump,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz warned in his first speech as Kamala Harris’ running mate.
“If you look this up at home,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claimed last month, “you will know that crime went down under Biden and crime went up under Trump. Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”
But the opposite is true: Between 2016 and 2020, violent crime fell by 17% under Trump — and soared by 43% under Biden between 2020 and 2022.
Of course, news outlets routinely assert that Americans are mistaken in believing that violent crime is rising.
On Monday, Axios had a typical headline: “New data shows violent crime dropping sharply in major U.S. cities.”
Or from NPR earlier this year: “Violent crime is dropping fast in the US — even if Americans don’t believe it.”
But Democrats and the media don’t understand the difference between the number of crimes reported to police and the total number of crimes.
There are two measures of crime: One, the FBI’s NIBRS, counts the number of crimes reported to police yearly.
The other, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, asks about 240,000 people each year whether they have been victims of crime, in an attempt to measure both reported and unreported crimes.
Since 2020, these two measures have been highly negatively correlated: The FBI has been finding fewer instances of crime, but people are simultaneously answering in greater numbers that they have been victims.
We know that crime victims report only about 40% of violent crimes and 30% of property crimes to police. —>READ MORE HERE
Kamala Harris Is Trying to Run From Her Prosecutorial Record:
When Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx was elected to office in 2016, she appointed a transition team to develop policy recommendations. That team was co-chaired by then-California Attorney General and Sen.-elect Kamala Harris.
Other than Harris, no one else on the transition team had been or was a career prosecutor. Most had dedicated their professional careers to social justice causes.
The transition team’s report reflected this fact.
Only 12 pages in length, the report made 23 recommendations. Key recommendations included highlighting racial inequalities in the justice system, a focus on the prosecution of police misconduct, the need to review convictions earned by the office for possible reversal and the need to increase diversity in the office.
Never once did the report mention Chicago’s high crime rates or ongoing gang problems. Instead, it focused on things such as developing a plan to make sure all attorneys in the office are trained on implicit bias and racial disparity in the criminal justice system.
Today, is Vice President Kamala Harris trying to run from her radical prosecutorial record?
When she wants her supporters to believe she was tough on crime, she trots out her tried-and-true tropes about being San Francisco’s and then California’s top legal officer. If that doesn’t sound good, she flip-flops and touts her progressive bona fides.
But this isn’t Burger King; she can’t have it her way. It’s the White House; the truth matters.
The truth is that Harris’ record shows that she is soft on crime and committed to coddling criminals at the expense of victims and our communities. Consider two cases from her time as San Francisco’s district attorney.
Harris refused to seek the death penalty against a man suspected of being a gang member, Edwin Ramos, who shot and killed a father and his two sons, even though California allows the state to seek the death penalty for multiple murders by the same person. Not only did Ramos kill three innocent people, but he also had previously been charged with robbing a pregnant woman.
In a different case, when a gang member killed San Francisco police Officer Isaac Espinoza and wounded his partner, Harris again refused to seek the death penalty.
At the time, this was considered radical even by liberal Democrats. —>READ MORE HERE
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